New Stem Cell Lines Eligible for Federal Funding

December 2, 2009

New Stem Cell Lines Eligible for Federal Funding

For hundreds of scientists, embryonic stem cell research takes a step into the present.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that 13 new
embryonic stem cell lines are now eligible for federal funding. That means that
scientists with NIH grants can study embryonic stem cells derived using newer, more refined methods generally considered to be superior to
the older ones. Ninety-six additional lines are also now under review.

“Those
were early days in the science of stem cell research, and much has been learned since
then,” said NIH director Francis Collins in a press conference on Wednesday, referring to the stem cell lines, created before 2001, that had previously been eligible for federal funding. “In the last eight years, hundreds of embryonic stem cell lines have been
derived using non-federal funds, many of them carrying more favorable characteristics.”

Using
only the old lines is like “being required to use Microsoft Word
1998,” says Jeanne Loring, director of the Center for Regenerative
Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, CA.

The earlier lines were
derived using animal products, making them largely unfit for therapeutic use.
“There are hundreds of embryonic stem-cell lines out there that have been
made under the best conditions, and some of them are patient ready,” says
John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. “They have greater utility,
performance, and safety than [the Bush-approved] lines.”

The announcement follows President Obama’s executive order
made last March, enabling government support for embryonic stem cell research.
That order overturned a previous one by President Bush in 2001, limiting
federally-funded research to a set of existing cell lines. The 2001 decree
forced scientists who wanted to create and use new stem cell lines, derived
from leftover IVF embryos, to garner private
funding.

Eleven of the 13 new lines were generated in George Daley’s lab
at Children’s Hospital, in Boston, which used private funding to make them.
According to the New York Times, “Dr. Daley said that private financing had
been drying up and that he was eager to start research on the now-approved cell
lines with the help of his federal grant money.” Researchers still cannot
derive new lines using federal funds–creating new lines requires the
destruction of an embryo.